Accounting 101: Those Pesky ODSP Income, Mileage and Expense Reports for Business and Employment.

Louis Shalako

When filling out the Income and Expense Report form for the Ontario Disability Support Program, it is important to get all the information first. This report form is therefore filled out last.

It doesn’t matter whether you fill out the mileage form or the time sheets first. I do the mileage form(s), using rough notes that I collect day-by-day. My rough notes give mileage readings, where I worked, (perhaps from two or three different part-time gigs) and I also put down the number of hours. I have a clipboard. There is a pen and a few sheets of paper on it.

When I get in the car, I write down the date, the destination, and the mileage.

When I get to work, I write down the mileage, if I go somewhere on business, including Shared Services, I write down the before and after mileage.

The mileage forms are the most tedious and so I do them first. I do a few entries, checking them off on the rough notes as I go. I take little breaks because I hate paperwork. The whole thing might take an hour and a half on a bad day, i.e., I’ve been busy making too much money.

Then I go through and make up official time sheets. I check them off as I go.

The next thing to do is to gather all of your receipts and statements. Keep them all in the same place, and yet separate from your personal, household accounts. I write off the phone, the internet and other necessary business expenses. If I buy stamps, envelopes or computer equipment, I keep the receipt. In the case of my phone, the invoice actually comes to my email inbox and so I just print that out once a month. I print out my bank activity once a month.* If you have a business vehicle, keep all receipts for repairs, insurance, licenses and stickers. I do the math on a blank sheet and share that with the ODSP, who apparently aren’t very good at that sort of thing…

Add up all income. This is the figure that goes on the Income Report. Add up all mileage, multiply that by the rate of $0.40. This gives a figure in dollars. Enter the mileage and the dollar amount on the Income Report. Any slot on the form that is empty, I just put a stroke through it so they know that I saw it. (Nothing to report.)

Enter expenses in the appropriate slots on the Income Report. For example, there is a separate slot for banking charges. This is eligible, especially so as the ODSP may require you to have a separate account for business. Enter this amount, your monthly charges of $10.95 or whatever. Individual cases and circumstances may differ.

In my own case, I enter phone and internet, added together, on the appropriate line.

If you buy a printer, enter it under ‘equipment’, etc. If you take income and put it toward an investment into the business, it’s better to get approval, and enter this into ‘approved business investment’. (Assuming you bought a forklift or something.) This one appears to be for major investments into the business. A $700.00 computer probably doesn’t require approval assuming your old one blew up or something. It is, after all, essential to the business, in much the same way a radiator repair is essential to the business vehicle. I would never ask permission for that, as it is just plain bad policy.

On or about the seventh of the next month, I go to Shared Services downtown. I photocopy all sheets, statements and receipts.

I make two copies and give the ODSP the originals except the internet bill, the original I keep for myself. They want an original, pen and ink signature on the forms, which is just my interpretation. I don't really need that for my own purposes.

I keep one copy for my own records, and also provide a copy to my major employer and business mentor for their own records and tax-reporting. This gives me backup hard-copies in the case of fire, loss or destruction—and I don’t have to ask the ODSP for it.

Generally, it is more favourable to claim mileage as opposed to keeping fuel receipts.

This allows you to offset income which would otherwise be clawed back at the rate of $0.50/dollar once you get over their punitive, $200.00/month allowable income limit/barrier.

Just as an example, Party A spent roughly $10.00/day to put gas in the car in a recent month. That’s $300.00 in fuel expense for the business. Yet the mileage worked out to $541.00. This results in $231.00 in offset income. The client gets to keep that.

And why not?

You earned it, after all.

END

*My book royalties are shown on the printout of my bank account, which I report separately. 

Interestingly, the ODSP adds it all together after a year and scratches their collective heads, trying to figure out how to ding me for an overpayment. So far, I just haven't made that kind of money, although in the past, (2003), I have been forced to write them a cheque from my business account.

Thank you for reading.

Back to Work.

Photo by KDS444, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako





Years ago, I had a house and a mortgage. ODSP was paying $930.00 a month at the time.

What with house payments, taxes, heat, hydro, water and insurance, it was a tough go each and every month. I rode a bicycle and lined up at food banks, which sounds familiar to many Canadians. Going back to work was tough too. My first day was two hours--two hours, at ten bucks an hour, picking up shingles and stuffing them into a bin. I drove up to Port Franks to work with my brother.

I went back a few days later, and stripped shingles off of a roof for about four hours including clean-up. Forty bucks and maybe five bucks worth of gas if I was lucky. I can’t really recall now, but Steve might have bought me a coffee and a doughnut.

Sometimes it’s good just to get out of the house.

The thing is to keep going back, I guess. No matter how fucking painful it is. I’m fifty-seven years old this time around, too.

Going back to work, with back problems, and totally out of shape from a fairly sedentary lifestyle, is always going to be hard.

So. I’ve been shoveling a bit of mulch and it’s the same thing: two or three hours a day, max. 

That shoveling and wheeling things around in wheelbarrows is very hard on the back. When you’re all out of shape, it’s pretty exhausting, working in the hot sun. That’s why I go out there early in the morning…I always did prefer to get things done. I don’t mind coming home a bit early and at least I have something to show for it.

Yeah, and I need the money, too. Quite frankly, I seem to be falling behind, with not a hope in hell of paying off my credit card, for example. I would very much like to find another place to live before I strangle somebody…

As far as the book sales go, they’re nothing to write home about.

I had my own company back then, and I reported my income and all of that. You need to stay out of trouble with the ODSP, and don’t forget, there’s a rat born every minute anyways.

That was back in 2002, 2003, and 2004, when I finally wound it up. In addition to roofing with my brother, I also did the commercial interior renovations for four Curves for Women. 

Those were in Petrolia, Glencoe, Blenheim and Tilbury. At some point I had bought an old GMC S-15 from my brother, and when I finally scrapped her, she had 362,000 kilometres on the odometer. Considering that I was going back and forth to London and all these other little towns; that must have been one pretty good little truck.

After a while, I had saved up something like $12,000 and the ODSP was all over me like a dirty shirt because I wasn’t allowed to have that much in my business bank account.

That’s when I bought a Ford Windstar minivan, which was good because the tools were all indoors. You don't want to leave them in the truck overnight, not in this or any other neighbourhood. It had nice captain’s seats and a good view down the road, being a couple of feet higher off the ground as compared to the pickup.

The way things are right now, I need to find some sort of part-time work, and the truth is that the two or three-hour a day thing is only going to take a person so far. The only employers willing to put up with that are essentially relatives, maybe one hell of a good friend somewhere if I had one.

Otherwise I’m not making it, and the rent here goes up each and every year. That’s sort of what happened to my house, essentially. There it was the taxes, which went up from twelve hundred a year to over eighteen hundred in about four years. I was only going to be able to keep the place for so long and I would have had to sell anyways.

The funny thing was, after cleaning the place up, when I sold it, I made around $23,000.00.

That was the equity, the reward supposedly for my risk and my efforts, and in the end I was unable (maybe even afraid) to buy another house. The ODSP was all over it, of course, and so I had to ‘spend it down’, which is their polite way of saying piss the money away as quickly as possible and go back to abject poverty again. That’s just the way things are, sometimes.

The thing with the ODSP, is that I can earn a couple of hundred bucks a month, after that it’s fifty cents on the dollar in what they call overpayments. Basically, they do their best to keep you in abject poverty, otherwise someone a lot better off than you would be bitching and whining about cheaters.

Let's just say I'm doing okay and we'll leave it at that.


End

What Would A Basic Minimum Income For Ontario Look Like?

http://wallpapercave.com/w/AhN6BZh

Louis Shalako

What would a basic minimum income look like for Ontario?

It’s very hard to say without knowing what the government’s pilot project actually looks like. 

Hopefully we’ll get more information on that very soon.

Let us assume the goal is to get every citizen at least up to the poverty line. While this number varies according to location across the province, living in Toronto and other major cities being more expensive than living in some other places, let us assume this is about $20,000.00 per year for a single adult.

In Switzerland, they’ll be voting on one such proposal on June 5. If you look closely, you’ll see that the program will be funded approximately 75 % by new taxes and the rest is expected to come from savings in other social programs. We are comparing apples to oranges here, but Switzerland, like Canada and the Province of Ontario are capitalistic, socialist states. They’re relatively affluent, not only in natural resources, but agriculture, technology, and their present state of development.

In Kenya, as little as $250.00 to $400.00 a year can make a big difference in health and welfare outcomes.

In Ontario, the only thing really under discussion is a pilot program, much like the one in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. If you take a small community, the cost of a pilot program is much less than the institution of such a program over an entire province or country.

Under such circumstances, one could have a very successful pilot program, one costing five or ten or twenty million dollars without ever having to justify it politically, without ever even speculating as to where all the funding might actually come from. Back then, the one in Dauphin cost $17 million overall—pocket change by modern, budgetary standards.

While I have no doubt that the government is prepared to make such a social experiment, (heading to the polls a short time later), one has to wonder just how serious they are at pursuing this to a logical end—or whether this is just another cleverly disguised attempt to gut the Ontario Disability Support Program, or Ontario Works, or whatever.

Proponents usually contend that such programs will be funded entirely by savings in other programs—or they sure don’t mind being misinterpreted along such lines, but if so, then such programs must inevitably be underfunded, for surely the government social programs they are intended to replace have always been underfunded. This has been true since day one, and that includes the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, and a hundred other programs administered by this government.

Here’s an Ontario Works (welfare) rate chart. A single person would receive, per month, $305.00 for their basic needs and $376.00 for shelter costs—which is about half what I pay for rent, although I’m not on welfare. In this province, benefits are divided into ‘basic needs’ and ‘shelter costs.’ If you don’t have a home, (or at least an address), then you don’t qualify for shelter costs. (The government did away with moving benefits some time ago, although start-up benefits may still be available depending on program. For the most part, these programs have been fiscally gutted by this very same government.)

Back to our point.

That’s $681.00 a month to keep body and soul together. Inevitably, most of that will go for rent, and that’s why people on welfare line up at food banks. They end up homeless and on the street, and they end up in a whole host of unenviable social situations such as divorce, court, jail and in other programs largely dedicated to mental health and addictions. How much of this will be alleviated by living in less stressful social conditions, and how will this translate into sufficient savings and efficiencies to justify the basic minimum income social program?

That’s a real good question and one worth asking.

It’s as much about people as it is about saving money or redistributing income in an era of growing inequality and degenerating social justice.

It’s a simple equation.

Where there is no hope there is no incentive. Life is hard at the lowest socio-economic strata. 

People are the same everywhere. They all need the same things. And it’s just what they can’t get. They’re not going anywhere and they know it. And the day is long—very long. I know that from personal experience. Filling that day leads to social problems largely stemming from boredom, desperation and availability.

The $681.00 a month adds up to $8,172.00 a year. This is approximately $12,000.00 below the poverty line, which I make out to be about $20,000.00 a year in anything but a major city. 

I am referring to Ontario, Canada, 2016, just so we are defining our terms accurately.

Assuming the goal of an anti-poverty program is to bring people up to the poverty line, this is $12,000.00 that has to come from somewhere—somewhere else, as the taxpayers are no doubt already saying.

That’s an additional $1,000.00 a month, which would admittedly change people’s lives. The problem is that there are something like 750,000 clients of the ODSP program in the province, and probably another 125,000 families on Ontario Works. This does not address the numbers of unemployed and underemployed family members who fall below the poverty line. 

Neither does it include the millions of Ontarians working full time hours for minimum, sub-poverty wages. Just for the record, I know a lot of these people personally. My own bias has been disclosed.

Ahem.

If their family income went up, it is entirely possible that their taxable income would also go up—a fact often overlooked by commentators who have never experienced the challenges. 

Basically if you want to tax the poor, first you have to give them a raise. But it is entirely possible that middle class taxes could go down or be reduced under such a system.

The real question is, would that new life cause or incur savings in other areas, to the tune of $1,000.00 a month, or greater, from the ‘mean average’ or median individual in question. 

This is the question the taxpayers should be asking.

For parents with children, or for adults with dependent adults in the household, the no-questions-asked aspect of the proposed basic minimum income has to sound pretty good.

For a single person on disability, (ODSP) it has to sound pretty good. In my own case, I can honestly say that an additional eight or nine hundred bucks a month would make a big difference in my diet, my clothing certainly—and communication, transportation and entertainment. It would allow me to invest a small amount each and every month into my business and maybe even into some kind of savings program.

I’ll be of retirement age in another eight years. After that, the ODSP has no hold on me. It would be nice if the benefits could remain in force even when a recipient went out of province or even out of the country—perhaps for up to six months at a time.

Here’s a funny thing, and I don’t think it’s a contradiction at all. But I get a pension, and I also work full time as a writer; which is admittedly one of the most marginal professions going.

The problem, is that I don’t make enough money in this new abundance economy. That problem is only compounded for people with a family to feed and a home to make and a shit part-time job in some scab industry which is already being subsidized by scab wages, an abundance of unskilled labour and this crazy mind-set that somehow work brings dignity. The truth is that leisure and the arts bring dignity.

The problem is that this is only a trial balloon, never meant to actually float.

You heard it here first.

There’s not enough good jobs to go around, but there’s nothing we can do about poverty per se. There are only so many skills to go around—and colleges and universities and training programs also cost this province a lot of money and there aren’t always enough jobs for those graduates.

But here’s an interesting thing. The federal government already pays Harmonized Sales Tax rebates. They already pay or contribute to Child Daycare Tax Credits. They already pay pension benefits to the elderly and there are federal disability programs. (And it’s a crock of shit because I didn’t qualify.) The province pays plenty to the almost universally excoriated Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

They’re already spending hundreds of billions between the two levels of government for bloated and inefficient bureaucracies, and yes, this includes the police, court and prison systems. This already includes the medical, hospital and mental health systems. It also employs a lot of people at a relatively high level of income and status. This is a concern that will have to be addressed, to the tune of much angst no doubt.

It is only by bringing in a much smaller government apparatus, and perhaps some incremental increase in tax assessment rates that this program has a hope of succeeding universally, in the long term.

There are already mechanisms in place to pay the money—the federal and provincial income tax systems come to mind. With modern algorithmic systems and self-reporting, with verification through existing channels, the program could be made to work if the political and social will actually exists to do so.

You sort of have to wonder.

END